YMMV / Days of Thunder

• Alternative Character Interpretation: There is speculation Cole's Uncertified Expert status is an Actor Allusion to Tom Cruise himself and his struggles with dyslexia.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Since actual footage is mixed up with movie-made footage, this tends to happen sometimes.
  • The "Ice Cream" scene is based off a real-life occurrence between racer Benny Parsons and his pit crew.
• Genre Turning Point: Film journalist Stephen Metcalf has argued that the film's wretched production excesses, and their attendant impact on the film's profits, made auteur-driven filmmaking acceptable again a decade after the notion had been discredited by the box-office failure of Heaven's Gate. United Artists' willingness to indulge Michael Cimino on that film had led to a backlash where studios favored producers like Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer who were effectively the sole creative forces behind their films, with directors merely taking orders from them. After similar excesses on the part of the producers, studios would let directors assert themselves creatively again, and it's no coincidence that Days director Tony Scott's critical reputation improved over the course of the '90s.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • John C. Reilly in an early NASCAR themed movie? You don't say...
  • Rowdy and Cole's rivalry is rather similar to the one Hall of Famers Dale Earnhardt and Jeff Gordon would develop in the mid-late '90s.
• Retroactive Recognition: Although Michael Rooker had already been in several high-profile films by this point, he was still very early in his career,
• Spiritual Successor: Tom Cruise controls (pilots) an extremely fast piece of machinery, deals with a crisis about 2/3's of the way in following a traumatic accident involving a friend, only to come out of it at the end and win the heart of his higher-class love interest. All with a power ballad soundtrack. This movie was also directed by Tony Scott.
• Unintentional Period Piece: As seen in the scenes where the drivers entered pit road, a sign board man would stand holding the pit road sign while the cars would attempt to rush in and out of pit road with as little time lost as possible. In 1991, as a reaction to a tragedy during the season-ending 1990 Atlanta Journal 500 when Ricky Rudd lost control of his car, which struck and killed Mike Ritch, a member of Bill Elliott's pit crew, NASCAR made a series of changes, including replacing the pit board men in favor of having someone dangling a large sign that was known as a lollipop, requiring pit road to be closed when the caution flag is first displayed and (after a brief period of allowing only odd or even numbered cars to pit for tires on the second {if an odd number} or third {if even} lap after the restart) adopting pit road speed limits.
• Values Dissonance: The prominent appearance of Confederate flags flying in the opening montage. For one thing NASCAR no longer permits their presence, and even if they were there it's highly unlikely movies from later decades would have featured them in the edit.

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